Li Bai

Li Bai, who lived from about 701 to 762 and is also known by his courtesy name Taibai, was a Chinese poet acclaimed as one of the best and most important poets of the Tang dynasty and of Chinese poetry as a whole. With friends such as Du Fu he stood among the leading figures of the flourishing the Tang era is remembered for as the Golden Age of Chinese Poetry. About one thousand poems attributed to him survive, and thirty-four appear in the anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. His poems became models for celebrating friendship, nature, solitude and the pleasures of drinking, and works such as The Hard Road to Shu and Quiet Night Thought are still taught in Chinese schools. Ezra Pound drew eleven of the nineteen poems in his 1915 Cathay from him. A legend says he drowned reaching for the moon reflected in a river.